Malus Communis: Turn your DVD Rack into a Tree

Most shelves are very boring. You know the drill, you need a no-nonsense place for all your DVDs, CDs, books and video games. Most living rooms have a mismatched array of shelves in order to store all of those things. In fact, we just get used to having our stuff stored this way. But what if someone found a better way to store our stuff, a way that's different and interesting? That's what Malus Communis is, and we think it's really great to store things this way.

Malus Communis was designed by the Belgian studio Defact. The design is made up out of a bunch of green metal shelves placed so that they form the branches of a stylized tree. Defact says that it represents the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It's made to store DVDs, CDs, and books. The shelf even comes with a seat, built-in, where you can consume the piece of knowledge you've just retrieved from the tree.

Malus Communis is part of show that been displayed in over 40 rooms of the White Hotel in Belgium, Brussels, well-known for its modern design. Over the weekend, 70 designers participated in transforming rooms in the hotel as part of The White Hotel Brussels Designer's RDV. David Richiuso from Defact Studio displayed his Malus Communis there.

We think that this shelf is simply fabulous. Even though it looks complicated, we are sure that people can make and assemble shelves like these by themselves, using existing Ikea ones for example. The trick is to draw a plan on how to place the shelves on a wall beforehand. [via DesignBoom]